Asian Language Teachers PLD

Getting together face to face is a special event for our teachers who are spread all around the country. Thanks to our MoE ALLiS project we are able to provide PLD opportunities for our Asian language teachers. Big thanks also to Core Education who provided a venue for us at their Auckland offices.

Some of our teachers who had been collaborating online through 2016 got to meet each other in person for the first time. We also welcomed our new Korean teacher Sunny and our new MLA Sixuan. 

Importantly this is a time to come together as a team and share the experience that is already in this group, explore new strategies and resources and prepare for the year ahead. Ideas are bounced around the group, examples of what works well & challenges are shared and preparation is made for the year ahead.  

We really miss our other team members and look forward to when there will be MoE funding that covers ALL of us! 

Here are some words of wisdom from our teachers today:

• This is a very special opportunity to work with children from all around NZ.
  
• Get to know your children - what is special in the area they come from, what do they like, what is happening at their school.
  
• Plan learning activities within context that interests them.
  
• Have a range of different activities to account for different abilities and age levels.
  
• Make follow up (out of class) work very do-able - short, interactive, a video, a quizz, a game. 
  
• Have it ready for them straight from their lesson. Show them in class, before they go.
  
• Have a Plan A and Plan B.
• Enjoy it and have fun.
• Set our children up for success - lots of encouragement, accept all their contributions .
• Some children are still learning how to learn with others online, some may be more hesitant to start with until they gain confidence.
• Communication with the students home school is really important - learning is a partnership between the teacher, the student and the student's school support person.
• Online teaching is different than teaching face to face, you will need to teach differently.
• When connecting to schools in other countries, be prepared that they will not be as flexible as we are - they often have to ask for permission even right up to district level and stick to their set 'allowed' times.
• You need to have a shared agenda that is reciprocal, so that you are not just providing them with English practice only (or vice versa) - consider a project based approach.
  

Today we also explored more of the features of Zoom web-conferencing, we practiced using breakout rooms, sharing and annotating screens, and file sharing. We reviewed our shared files in Drive (these are our working documents), and our shared resource websites where we will collate and share resources from our collection that support our planning.

Here are two key resources from today's session:

Reading: How can VC Teachers foster and support e-learning and virtual learning? (a resource from NZCER - Students Experiences of Learning in Virtual Classrooms)

VLN Primary Curriculum Resource Site (ongoing and under development)  This site is made in new Google sites, and when this version is stable, then all our teachers can help manage their own curriculum areas from here. Our resource site links to our Languages Curriculum Statement, the planning documents for the different language areas, and supporting resources for different topic areas in each language area. Our key collections will be shared from here.

Finally, we spent some time exploring Google classrooms and comparing with our existing WeLearn student hub. We could see that these two sites could complement each other; WeLearn being the main portal site for all students and teachers, linking off to different learning groups, resources or Google classrooms.

As an online learning community, we have to balance the need to have one system we all use (WeLearn) with the need to explore and develop emerging technologies (at the moment this is Google Classroom).